Monthly Archives: March 2013

One man is facing criminal charges in New Jersey after detectives found a truck he was driving with roughly $200,000 worth of stolen Muenster cheese from Wisconsin.

Veniamin Konstantinovich Balika, 34, of Plainfield, Ill., was arrested at the Vince Lombardi Service Area off the New Jersey Turnpike. New Jersey State Police Detective 1 Oliver Sissman said he allegedly provided false paperwork to the distributor of K&K Cheese in Cashton last week to get the 42,000 pounds of cheese loaded onto his 18-wheel truck.

No spur-of-the-moment cheese theft is this. The guy did some work to prepare for his escapade. He was planning to sell it under market value to some East Coast retailers. Cheese for cheese, I suppose.

So I’m sick as a dog but can’t sleep, so I’m watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s just high-end enough to keep me interested, but comfortable and familiar enough not to overexert my fuzzed-out brain.

I was watching the episode where the Enterprise gets caught in a time loop and at the end they encounter a starship named the Bozeman, captained by Kelsey Grammer. It suddenly hit me that on The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon decided to move to Bozeman Minnesota after his apartment was robbed. Sure enough, it was done as a quiet shout-out to Star Trek. Bozeman was also the place where humans first met Vulcans, so naturally Sheldon would go there.

Chateau Heartiste has another “Beta Of The Month” going, with three candidates in the running. Contestant #3, knowing his wife was about to cheat or had already done so, posted –

People are to be LOVED. Things are to be USED. The reason why the world is in chaos is because THINGS are being LOVED and PEOPLE are being used,” the message declares.

Love and use are not mutually exclusive. Years ago, Walter E. Williams wrote –

I’m reminded of charges of exploitation Mrs. Williams used to make early on in our 44-year marriage. She’d charge, “Walter, you’re using me!” I’d respond by saying, “Honey, sure, I’m using you. If I had no use for you, I wouldn’t have married you in the first place.” How many of us would marry a person for whom we had no use? As a matter of fact, the problem of the lonely hearts among us is that they can’t find someone to use them.

I went to the pizza place and ordered extra cheese w/ green pepper. As I was carrying the box back to my car, I suddenly decided to check inside the box. Pepperoni.

I dropped to my knees on the cement sidewalk as the light rainy drizzle fell. Why, I shouted to the Heavens while shaking my fists in empty rage against my fate, couldn’t I have waited until I got home and it would have been too much effort to drive back and get it without pepperoni?

What Do You Do For An Encore? has reached 100 posts. Pretty quickly, too. His focus is primarily on music, ranging from funk to progressive to jazz to J-Pop and a couple things I don’t know what they are. I’ve discovered some great stuff there, such as Kimiko Kasai covering Herbie Hancock’s Butterfly (I had never heard either one, as far as I recall), the utter surreality of Caroline Charonplop Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and something called alley shrines. And sometimes he just goes nuts. I suspect heavy drinking is involved, but he says no.

Go check it out and get some learnin’ about all kinds of music and maybe a little about Japanese culture, too.